SK Eco Plant Targets AI Data Center Market With Semiconductor Factory Construction Technology
The company hopes to use its experience managing electricity, cooling, air conditioning, and pipes together to grow its business.
SK Eco Plant is working harder to enter the artificial intelligence (AI) data center market. It wants to use the technology and experience it gained from building semiconductor factories. Semiconductor factories and AI data centers have similar needs. Both need a steady supply of electricity and carefully controlled cooling and air conditioning systems.
According to the real estate industry on October 23, SK Eco Plant has spent the past two years changing its business to focus more on AI and semiconductors. Starting this year, the company is getting involved in projects from the early design stage. This will help it improve how it plans and builds important systems, including electricity, air conditioning, water, and pipes. Its goal is to become an "AI infrastructure solution provider," meaning a company that provides the important systems needed to run AI facilities.
SK Eco Plant developed these skills by building semiconductor factories for SK Hynix. The company has worked on major semiconductor production facilities in Icheon and Yongin in Gyeonggi Province, and Cheongju in North Chungcheong Province. Building a semiconductor factory requires more careful and exact work than building an ordinary building. Its electricity, air conditioning, and ultra-pure water systems, which supply extremely clean water, must all work together properly. The factory also needs clean rooms that keep dust out.
One important example is the Cheongju M15X project. In this project, new production facilities were built directly next to the existing M15 factory and connected to it side by side. The M15 factory continued operating during construction. This made the work especially difficult because workers had to keep vibrations and noise as low as possible so they would not disturb semiconductor production in the existing factory.
At the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster, which is still being built, SK Eco Plant is constructing a three-level semiconductor factory, also called a three-layer FAB. Each level has clean rooms. A typical two-level factory has four clean rooms, but a three-level factory can have six. This design allows more semiconductors to be made on the same amount of land. When a building is taller than 100 meters, workers must use different methods to lift building materials and construction equipment. SK Eco Plant is using the construction technology it has developed through earlier projects to handle these challenges.
The company is also using a method called "Pre-construction." This means looking for possible construction problems while the building is still being designed, before actual construction begins. In a semiconductor factory, even one design change can affect many different systems and steps in the building process. SK Eco Plant checks early whether the building can be constructed as planned and whether different systems might get in each other's way. By doing this, it hopes to finish construction faster and spend less money.
SK Eco Plant is also helping build semiconductor factories outside South Korea. One example is SK Hynix's project in West Lafayette, Indiana, in the United States. The project includes an advanced packaging production facility and a research and development (R&D) center for next-generation AI memory chips. SK Eco Plant plans to use the technology it developed while building semiconductor factories in South Korea. It will adjust its methods to fit the availability of workers and building materials in the United States.
SK Eco Plant plans to use this experience to build AI data centers as well. AI data centers and semiconductor factories have important things in common. Both need large amounts of electricity and carefully controlled cooling and air conditioning systems. The company plans to grow its business by using the mechanical, electrical, and piping (MEP) management technology it developed for semiconductor factories. This technology helps manage these different systems together during data center construction.
"Our job is to build the complicated and carefully designed systems that the AI industry needs, and to finish them on time," an SK Eco Plant official said. "We will become more competitive by understanding what customers need, making different systems work together, and managing the timing of investments."